RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/defund-colleges-not-cops/#

‘Defund the police!’ That’s the spray-painted, placarded, pixeled demand of the moment. The American left, from Black Lives Matterers to their knee-taking social-justice allies in their hydrangea-colored masks, has decided now is the moment to drain public resources from the custodians of public order.

I have an alternative. Now is the moment to defund the colleges. We should defund them because they are the root of the virulent anti-Americanism that feeds the riots, the looting and the learned helplessness that afflict the country. And they have been feeding the protest culture for generations. The chief lesson taught by our nation’s colleges and universities is soft disdain for our country and its forms of self-government. And the soft disdain ripens to outright antipathy for about a quarter of the graduates.

Defunding the police is a supposed cure for endemic racism and white supremacy. But America is not a racist country. To denounce America as racist is to accept a falsification of history and a wild distortion of the everyday reality experienced by Americans of every race. That some Americans of every race are racists doesn’t mean the country is racist. Racism is a feeble and fugitive feature of American life.

Why are so many Americans at the moment willing to endorse such a manifestly false claim? Because so many Americans have been to colleges that marinate them in the brine of Howard Zinn-style Marxist polemics against America, feminist screeds against patriarchy, black victimization narratives and the whole gamut of identitarian, teeth-gnashing nonsense. The graduates then walk these messages across the street to jobs in media, entertainment and technology where the visceral hatred of American values has become the elevator key to the executive suite. America has a real problem not with racism but with miseducation. We can start fixing that problem by defunding the colleges.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/in_a_world_of_sheeplike_conformity_hillsdale_college_takes_a_stand.html

Free Will Baptists founded Hillsdale College in 1844 under the name Michigan Central College. Despite the founders’ religious beliefs, the college has always been nonsectarian, although its teachings are informed by Christianity’s moral teachings. The college assumed its present name in 1853 when it relocated to Hillsdale, Michigan.

The Free Will Baptists who founded Hillsdale were abolitionists and true feminists, so the college immediately began admitting blacks and women. E.B. Fairfield, who was Hillsdale’s president from 1848 to 1869, was one of the founders of the Republican Party, a political party dedicated to abolishing slavery in the United States.

Because of Hillsdale’s abolitionist reputation, Frederick Douglass spoke there, as did Edward Everett, who shared the stage with Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. When the Civil War began, Hillsdale sent a higher percentage of students to the Union Army than any other college in Michigan. Sixty students gave their lives in the fight against slavery.

In the 20th century, as myriad colleges gave up their intellectual independence chasing after state and federal money (and, it seems, Chinese money), Hillsdale refused to do so. As it has since its founding, it depends entirely on private donations and tuition to meet its needs. Hillsdale is also one of the few colleges in America that continues the classic inquiring tradition of a liberal education, rather than falling in line with academic leftism and mindless obedience.

In sum, Hillsdale is a bastion of intellectual liberty, founded on a moral and historic bedrock dedicated to the equal rights of all people, regardless of race or sex. So, of course, people began insisting that it issue a statement supporting Black Lives Matter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/cutting_off_donations_to_my_alma_mater.html

“What to do when your college apologizes for begging for money  “in the midst of this necessary national reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality.”

Henry Wickham, Kenyon College class of 1972, has agreed to share with readers a letter he wrote to our mutual alma mater, which we both have watched get captured by the left.  We both decided to stop donating to the college after being appalled upon receiving a recent fundraising appeal that contained the following disclaimer:

We know that fundraising for Kenyon likely isn’t your primary focus right now, in the midst of this necessary national reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality. 

For those who are unfamiliar with Kenyon, it used to be a rigirous classical liberal arts college, blessed with one on the most beautiful campuses in the world, and at the time we attended it, dedicated to teaching the foundations of the liberal arts and sciences.

 Here is how Henry responded. I think that this situation describes many schools, especially but not limited to the more highly selective and higher prestige campuses.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/charter-schools-enemies-block-black-success-11592520626?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

For decades, there has been widespread anxiety over how, when or whether the educational test score gap between white and non-white youngsters could be closed. But that gap has already been closed by the Success Academy charter school network in New York City.

Their predominantly black and Hispanic students already pass tests in mathematics and English at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state. That includes predominantly white and Asian school districts where parental income is some multiple of what it is among Success Academy students.

New York’s charter school students are predominantly black and Hispanic, and live in low-income neighborhoods. In 2019, most students in the city’s public schools failed to pass the statewide tests in mathematics and English. But most of the city’s charter school students passed in both subjects.

Such charter school results undermine theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests and assertions that racial “integration” is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity with whites.

Back In 2013, a higher percentage of the fifth-graders in a Harlem charter school passed the mathematics test than any other public school fifth-graders in the entire state of New York.

The success of New York City’s charter schools is not only a threat to educational dogmas. Competition from charter schools is an existential threat to traditional public schools in low-income minority communities, which tend to have even lower educational outcomes than traditional public schools as a whole.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/17/harvard-eliminates-sat-and-act-from-its-application-process/

The elite Harvard University has announced that it will be removing the SAT and ACT scores requirement from its application process, citing the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse, according to The Daily Caller.

The change will go into effect for all prospective students applying for the class of 2025. In a statement, the university said that the pandemic “has created insurmountable challenges in scheduling tests for all students, particularly those from modest economic backgrounds.” The statement also seems to confirm that the removal of the test score requirement will not be permanent, saying that “we believe this temporary change addresses these challenges.”

Instead, applying students will be asked “to send whatever materials they believe would convey their accomplishments in secondary school and their promise for the future.”

Other universities have already permanently dropped the SAT and ACT requirements, including the entirety of the University of California system, which encompasses 10 different colleges across the state. Far-left “civil rights” groups have falsely claimed that the score requirement amounts to discrimination against poor students and minority students.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/16/how-our-anti-american-education-system-made-riots-inevitable/

Rioting social justice warriors are remaking the world as they see fit, consistent with what they’ve been taught from K-12 to the highest echelons of learning.

The past fire-lit weeks in America’s cities have made clear that the protests, and the riots that attend them, have little to do with the condemnable alleged murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis.

Even in the non-violent demonstrations, protesters can be seen burning the American flag, an act that just 30 years ago engendered such outrage it spurred Congress to pass an unconstitutional law, but doesn’t even warrant coverage today. In broad daylight, protesters have defaced and toppled statues dedicated to any and all figures of America’s history.

Lest anyone think the mob’s Year Zero behavior stopped with the slaveholding Confederacy, in Boston a monument to the 54th Massachusetts, an all-black Union regiment during the Civil War, was among those vandalized. Matthias Baldwin, an early abolitionist, got the same treatment in Philadelphia, as did the lesser-known Rotary Club founder Paul Harris, whose plaque in Washington D.C. was marked simply with an ignorance-acknowledging “probably a racist.” The monument to the author of the Emancipation Proclamation on the National Mall was likely spared only because of the protection of the National Guard.

As John Daniel Davidson has noted, toppling statues is not a good sign for the future of the republic; it looks a lot less like a policy conversation about police reform than it does regime change and revolution.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/14/in_the_war_for_social_justice_academic_freedom_is_an_early_casualty_143444.html

WASHINGTON — In the war for social justice, academic freedom is an early casualty. Consider the plight of UCLA Accounting Professor Gordon Klein.

A student sent Klein an email, screenshots of which were reviewed by Inside Higher Ed, that asked for “no-harm” grading for the final exam. (That term means counting a grade only if it improves a student’s overall course grade.) The student also asked for shorter exams and extended deadlines for black students who attended protests after the death of George Floyd.

Inside Higher Ed described the email as “a request from students who identified themselves as nonblack allies of their black peers.”

Klein wrote back that he “gives black students special treatment” and then asked for the names of black classmates; he had been conducting class online and wasn’t sure about students’ ethnicity.

Klein also wondered if some white students, say those from Minneapolis, might be traumatized and in need of an edge as well. And what of students of mixed race? He questioned how he could give a “no-harm” test when the final exam is the only exam of the semester. And he wondered how Martin Luther King Jr. might have reacted to the suggestion that students be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.”

A complaint was lodged. On June 3, UCLA suspended Klein until June 24 to give administrators time to consider the complaint. Anderson School of Management Dean Antonio Bernardo wrote that it appeared Klein had “disregard for our core principles, including an abuse of power.”

 I just received the school’s appeal which stated:

“This is a moment in history. Our children will ask us one day, if they have not already, what we did as a community to make lasting, positive, and meaningful change from this moment. And we must ask ourselves this same question. Our hope is that the Oakwood community will fulfill its mission and continue as a leading institution committed to the work of racial equity and antiracism.“

As a proud momma of a graduate, an ER doc who assists the National Guard in his spare time, I wrote:

“Our children will ask us why we allowed the destruction of our communities, stood by as law enforcement and civilians were beaten by radical Leftist groups, allowed businesses (including those belonging to blacks) to be burned and permitted looting – all activities that are inimical to a law and order constitutional republic.

They will also ask us if “black lives mattered,” why was there no outcry about the 7,000 black Americans murdered annually, most at the hands of other blacks?  Our children will want to know where the protest was when retired black St. Louis police chief, David Dorn, was murdered as a result of the radical Leftist mayhem.

They will ask us why we didn’t do anything to stop the amalgamation of Maoists, Marxists and Islamic radicals that make up Antifia, BLM, La Raza, CAIR, etc.  Why did we permit the destruction of our cities in the name of one black man with an extensive criminal record who died at the hands of one bad cop?

Most importantly, our children will ask us how we squandered the legacy of our Founders, lost the greatest experiment in liberty and individual freedom the world has every known, defiled the most enduring symbol of freedom (the American flag) and supplanted the greatest document in history insuring self-government, individual liberty and the rule of law in return for the misery of totalitarianism, poverty and lawlessness. 

Our children will scream, “How did you turn the United States of America, where millions of immigrants aspired to live, into Communist China in record time and leave us to live a life of enslavement and misery?”

 Janet Levy